Review & Photography by Nathan Vestal for MPM
The calendar said October 9, but inside The Vixen in McHenry it felt like Halloween had shown up three weeks early, kicked open the door, and immediately started asking where the fog machine was.
Wednesday 13 brought the Shocktober Blood USA Tour 2026 through Northern Illinois on Friday night, part of a 31-date run stretching from late September through Halloween. The McHenry stop paired him with Above Snakes, which made for a deceptively strong two-band bill: modern hard rock up front, followed by nearly two decades of horror punk, glam-metal sleaze, graveyard camp, and enough fake blood imagery to make a Spirit Halloween manager feel professionally inadequate. Wednesday 13’s official tour routing specifically marked McHenry as one of the dates where Dead on a Sunday was not appearing, leaving Above Snakes as the featured support for the night. Official Wednesday 13
The Vixen was an especially good fit for this kind of show. It is not an arena, and that is precisely the point. The room keeps the audience close enough to the stage that the separation between band and crowd largely disappears, which benefits an act like Wednesday 13 enormously. His whole live identity depends on exaggeration, facial expressions, costumes, gestures, props, and that strange old-school rock-and-roll ability to make several hundred people feel as though they are participating in the same bad idea at once. The venue listed doors at 6:30 for the all-ages show, and by the time the lights went down, the room had the comfortably unhealthy atmosphere required for the evening. The Vixen in McHenry
Above Snakes
Modern hard rock arrives first and refuses to behave like an opening act
Above Snakes walked into a difficult assignment. Opening for Wednesday 13 means stepping in front of a crowd that has largely arrived expecting corpse paint, horror-movie references, profanity, and songs about the dead. Trying to gently ease people into that evening would have been a losing strategy, so Above Snakes did the sensible thing and came out loud.
The Boston-based band has built itself around a very different kind of heaviness than Wednesday 13. Where the headliner pulls from horror punk, glam, metal, and shock rock, Above Snakes operates in the modern hard-rock lane, with big hooks, dense guitars, electronic textures, and the kind of production-minded songwriting designed to hit immediately rather than slowly reveal itself over seven minutes of artistic suffering. The band was founded around vocalist Johnny Skulls and guitarist Dax Dabs after the pair returned from Los Angeles to Boston and effectively rebuilt the project on their own terms. Their catalog includes songs such as “Adrenaline,” “The Broken Ones,” “Down,” “81 Thallium,” “Ride & Die,” and 2026 single “Make Amends,” the latter written with Johnny Andrews. abovesnakes
That background comes through in the live presentation. Above Snakes does not play like a band nervously hoping the headliner’s audience will approve of them. Their material is built around impact, and the band understands how to use a smaller stage efficiently. There is a lot of movement without the performance becoming chaotic, and the songs have enough melodic structure that even people unfamiliar with the material can find something to grab onto quickly.
Johnny Skulls is especially good at handling the opening-slot problem. There is a specific kind of confidence required to perform for people who may have never heard your band before and convince them within a few songs that checking their phones can wait. His delivery alternates between melodic vocals and harsher passages without feeling like the band is assembling a genre checklist. The hooks are large, but there is still enough grit underneath them to keep the material from drifting into polished radio-rock sterility.
The strongest thing about Above Snakes on this bill was the contrast they created. They did not try to sound like Wednesday 13. They did not dress the songs in horror imagery to make the pairing seem more obvious. Instead, they simply provided a much more contemporary version of heavy rock before the evening shifted sharply toward the theatrical and macabre.
“Make Amends” is a particularly useful example of where the band is headed. It is more controlled than some of their earlier material, but it still carries the weight and aggression that has defined Above Snakes from the beginning. The band has toured with acts ranging from Drowning Pool and Saliva to Motionless in White and In This Moment, and that experience shows. They know how to work a room that did not necessarily come for them. abovesnakes
By the end of the set, Above Snakes had done exactly what a good support act is supposed to do: leave with more people paying attention than when they arrived. There was no attempt to overstay the welcome or manufacture some grand emotional conclusion. They hit hard, established themselves, and handed the stage over.
Then everything got considerably more undead.
Wednesday 13
The Shocktober Blood tour turns McHenry into a low-budget horror movie with much better songs
Wednesday 13 has never been particularly interested in subtlety.
That is part of the appeal.
For more than twenty years, Joseph Poole has built Wednesday 13 around the glorious realization that heavy music does not always need to take itself seriously in order to be taken seriously. Horror movies, graveyards, serial killers, monsters, glam rock, punk, metal, B-movie sleaze, and very enthusiastic profanity have all been thrown into the same blender. The result should probably be ridiculous.
Frequently, it is.
That is why it works.
Wednesday 13 understands camp. There is a difference between accidentally looking ridiculous and deliberately weaponizing ridiculousness, and he has spent most of his career on the correct side of that line. The best Wednesday 13 shows feel like Alice Cooper, The Misfits, Mötley Crüe, and a stack of VHS horror tapes were abandoned together in a basement long enough to develop a shared personality disorder.
The 2026 tour arrived after the release cycle for Mid Death Crisis, the 2025 album that followed Horrifier. The newer material has given the band another reason to tour without forcing the show to become a promotional exercise where everyone politely waits for the old songs. The Shocktober Blood setlists documented earlier in the tour mixed current songs such as “When the Devil Commands,” “In Misery,” “Serpent Society,” and “Rotting Away” with older Wednesday 13 staples, Murderdolls material, and Frankenstein Drag Queens From Planet 13 songs. Setlist.fm
That career-spanning approach is important because Wednesday 13 has accumulated a surprisingly deep catalog. Casual listeners may think of the band primarily through a handful of horror-punk favorites, but the music has shifted considerably over the years. Some periods leaned heavily into glam and punk, others became darker and more metallic, and the more recent records have added a heavier modern edge without completely abandoning the sense of humor that has always kept the project recognizable.
Onstage, those different eras make more sense together than they sometimes do on record. “When the Devil Commands” works naturally beside “From Here to the Hearse.” “Rotting Away” can sit comfortably near “The Ghost of Vincent Price.” Songs from completely different periods are held together by the most reliable constant in Wednesday 13’s catalog: they all sound like they were written by somebody who considers October a lifestyle rather than a month.
The early part of the Shocktober Blood set has consistently been aggressive. Earlier tour dates opened with “When the Devil Commands,” followed by the Murderdolls’ “Summertime Suicide,” “From Here to the Hearse,” and “Look What the Bats Dragged In.” Setlist.fm It is a smart sequence because there is virtually no warm-up period. The audience gets the new material, an immediate Murderdolls connection, and then a pair of songs that sit comfortably within the classic Wednesday 13 aesthetic.
The Murderdolls songs carry an unavoidable extra weight now. Wednesday 13 spent years understandably keeping some distance between his solo work and that part of his history, but recent tours have brought the material back into the set in a way that feels less like nostalgia and more like reclamation. “Summertime Suicide” and “Nowhere” are not treated as museum pieces. They fit naturally into the show because that sleazy, exaggerated punk-metal DNA was never really absent from Wednesday 13’s solo material in the first place.
“Look What the Bats Dragged In” remains exactly the kind of song this environment was built for. It is stupidly catchy, proudly juvenile, and almost scientifically engineered to work inside a dark room full of people wearing black clothing. Some songs mature. Some songs deepen with age. Some songs simply remain extremely effective excuses for adults to yell ridiculous things together.
Wednesday 13 has wisely chosen the third category.
Horror, Humor, and the Lost Art of Actually Entertaining People
One of the things that separates Wednesday 13 from many modern metal acts is that the show is genuinely intended to be a show.
That sounds obvious until you attend enough concerts where five technically excellent musicians stand almost motionless under blue lighting for ninety minutes as though movement has been outlawed by the musicians’ union.
Wednesday 13 comes from an older tradition. The stage presentation matters. Clothing matters. Lighting matters. Introductions matter. Poses matter. The entire thing is meant to create a character and maintain it for the length of the performance.
The Shocktober Blood tour leans heavily into that. Wednesday changes appearance, works the front of the stage constantly, and plays directly to the audience rather than staring somewhere above it. There is nothing accidental about the imagery. The exaggerated horror aesthetic is fundamental to the songs rather than decoration added after rehearsals.
The current lineup is also tight enough to keep that theater from overwhelming the music. Wednesday 13’s touring band has been listed with Jack Tankersley on guitar, Ashes on lead guitar, Troy Doebbler on bass, and Mike Dupke on drums. Bandsintown The visual focus naturally stays on Wednesday, but the songs require a band capable of moving between punkier older material and the heavier, more polished attack of the newer records without making either sound out of place.
That flexibility becomes particularly important with tracks like “In Misery” and “Serpent Society.” They are darker and more metallic than much of the classic catalog, but live they gain some of the looseness that keeps Wednesday 13 from becoming another anonymous modern metal band. The guitars still hit hard, but there is dirt around the edges.
And dirt is useful here.
Nobody needs a perfectly sanitized Wednesday 13 performance. That would be like restoring a grindhouse theater until it looks like an Apple Store.
Vincent Price, Zombies, and Songs That Refuse to Die
“The Ghost of Vincent Price” remains one of the songs that best summarizes what Wednesday 13 does. It is melodic, theatrical, proudly obsessed with horror culture, and absolutely uninterested in whether any of this qualifies as sophisticated adult behavior.
Thank God.
There is something refreshing about a performer who understands exactly what his audience came to see and does not spend the night trying to prove he has outgrown it. Horror fandom often gets discussed as nostalgia, but Wednesday 13’s career demonstrates why that explanation is incomplete. People do not keep returning merely because they remember these songs from twenty years ago. They return because there is still something deeply enjoyable about a room full of adults collectively embracing theatrical nonsense for an evening.
“I Walked With a Zombie” may be the purest version of that relationship. It is one of Wednesday 13’s most recognizable songs and has remained among his most frequently performed tracks over the years. Setlist.fm There is no complicated thesis hiding inside it. There does not need to be. The riff arrives, the title tells you essentially everything required for participation, and suddenly a room full of people is shouting about zombies together.
Civilization has produced worse communal rituals.
Plenty of them involve PowerPoint.
The same is true of “Bad Things,” another song that has survived because it is brutally efficient. The chorus is immediate, the humor is dark without becoming self-serious, and the crowd interaction practically writes itself. Wednesday 13’s biggest songs often function less like compositions and more like social agreements between the stage and the audience.
Everybody knows what happens next.
Everybody participates.
Nobody pretends this is the Philharmonic.
The Obligatory Profanity Becomes a Community Event
Then there is “I Love to Say Fuck.”
There is no elegant transition available here.
The song does not deserve one.
Originally tied to Frankenstein Drag Queens From Planet 13, it has become Wednesday 13’s most frequently performed live song according to setlist statistics, ahead of “Bad Things” and “I Walked With a Zombie.” Setlist.fm This is simultaneously completely predictable and a useful commentary on humanity.
Give people twenty years of songwriting and they will inevitably choose the song where everybody gets to yell “fuck.”
Democracy in action.
As a closing number, though, it makes enormous sense. Wednesday 13 shows have always relied on the relationship between performer and crowd, and there is probably no more direct form of audience participation than several hundred people shouting the same obscenity on command. By that stage of the night, everyone understands the assignment.
What could easily become a cheap gimmick somehow remains charming because Wednesday has never pretended it is anything else. He knows the joke. The audience knows the joke. Everybody agrees to keep doing it because it is still fun.
That compact between performer and audience is probably the reason Wednesday 13 has endured as well as he has. There are heavier bands. There are scarier bands. There are more technically complex bands. There are bands with significantly larger production budgets.
Very few are this comfortable simply entertaining people.
Why The Vixen Worked
The Vixen deserves some credit for the night as well.
The venue sits at 1208 N. Green Street in McHenry, far enough removed from Chicago that a show like this feels genuinely local rather than like another stop swallowed by the larger city. The Vixen in McHenry That matters. Seeing Wednesday 13 in a massive festival environment is one experience. Seeing the band inside a smaller theater where the front row is close enough to examine the makeup is another.
For horror rock especially, intimacy helps.
The exaggerated gestures read better. The audience participation becomes louder relative to the room. The lighting feels more theatrical. The absurdity becomes personal.
There is also something inherently appropriate about Wednesday 13 playing a small theater in October. Putting the same production inside a sterile multipurpose arena would work, but some of the charm would disappear. This music belongs in places where the walls seem capable of remembering previous bad behavior.
The Vixen provided exactly that.
Two Bands, Two Completely Different Versions of Modern Rock
What ultimately made the evening work was the difference between the bands.
Above Snakes approached heaviness from a contemporary angle. Tight arrangements, modern production instincts, emotional hooks, and enough electronic texture to place the music firmly in the current hard-rock landscape. Wednesday 13 approached it from the opposite direction, dragging decades of punk, glam, shock rock, and horror culture onto the stage and gleefully refusing to clean any of it up.
On paper, that contrast could have been awkward.
Live, it helped.
Above Snakes gave the night an aggressive modern opening without attempting to compete with the theatrical identity of the headliner. Wednesday 13 then had the freedom to turn the room completely toward his own world.
Neither band diluted itself to fit the other.
That is how support bills should work.
